Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Won’t someone please think of the parents?!?! Star Wars and the other victims of mass shootings.

This column discusses
major plot-points of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It has major spoilers.

George Lucas’s Star Wars was mythological. His characters
were stand-ins for archetypes. Any one of us could imagine being Han, Luke, or
Leia, the hero who rises to the moral challenge. But J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars is
Shakespearean. His story is of specific families. His characters are particular
people whose histories matter. Audiences participate
in Lucas’s epic, but Abrams asks us to be voyeurs.

It should not be surprising then, that the most intimate
moments in The Force Awakens are the
ones we want to brush past quickly, the conversation between broken parents and
the love a father feels for his lost son. Lucas would have paused during these
moments. He would have allowed us to contemplate with his characters, as when
Luke sought his future in the double suns of Tatooine. But Abrams will have
none of that. Things happen fast in the latest installment because free will is
a luxury for Stormtroopers, not Skywalkers.

Han and Leia gave birth to a murderer. Luke failed to
educate him. But we are asked to empathize, not condemn. The new Star Wars film
announces that our cultural mythology can no longer limit ourselves to redeeming
the sins of our fathers, as they were called in less egalitarian times. We must
now turn to the legacy of the child gone wrong. Abrams shows us the parents’
lament and then gives us the generous gift of not dwelling on it. It’s simply
too painful to encounter the killer in one’s own child.

What is it like to be a parent the day, the year, or the decade
after your child murders at Columbine? How does one go on living knowing that
your kids set bombs at the Boston marathon or massacred 26 people at Sandy Hook?
How does it feel when your child shoots his spouse or rapes his friend, and how
much worse would it be to realize that you did nothing wrong, that this is just
who they are?

The Star Wars universe privileges nature over nurture,
although Leia tries very hard to take the blame. She shouldn’t have “let him go,”
she says, because that’s when she “lost him.” American mothers know this
routine, so few ever get to relax. They scrutinize themselves just as others
continually scrutinize them. Are they affectionate or watchful enough? Did they
read the right stories to their children? Did they eat soft cheese when they
were pregnant? They blame themselves because anything is better than blaming
their child.

Fathers, in contrast, grow quiet, then distant, and then
they leave. They go back, as Han claims, to doing what they do best, even if it
is self-destructive and solves nothing. It is easier to be a scoundrel smuggler
or an inspiring General than a failed parent. These are stereotypes, of course,
gender roles are particularly fluid these days, but they still ring true
because we privilege nurture over nature. We want someone to blame.

Leia and Han loved their son. To use the language of the
NRA, they were teaching him to be a good
guy with a blaster. And Uncle Luke would have complemented it all, mentoring him
to be a Jedi—a responsible light-saber owner—to control his feelings and to choose
the light side over the dark.But none
of it mattered in the Star Wars universe because he simply had “too much Vader
in him.” He was lost from the get-go. Simply put, what The Force Awakens acknowledges better than any other major film is
that sometimes it’s just not the parents.

I don’t know the Harris, Kliebold, Tsarvenv or Lanza parents,
but I am pretty sure they were not monsters. They no doubt made the same parenting
mistakes that we all do, but that’s not why their children did what they did.
Why did they murder? I don’t know. In the absence of the common theology that
the Jedi religion provides, all we can do is speculate and study. Those whoshut down academic research on gun violence are condemning us to endless tragedy.

It’s time to have a cultural conversation about how to feel for
the parents of children who do wrong. The United States has the largest prison population in the world and while many are incarcerated because of racism and
injustice, it would be naïve to suggest that many of our children are not
justifiably imprisoned. We also have the most guns in the world. While fewer Americans own firearms than in 1977, the average owner now has eight guns,
twice as many as 20 years ago. Americans are being frightened by their
politicians, beaten down by economic inequality, and are shockingly unhappy for
a country that has so much going for it. It’s going to get worse before it gets
better, and we will all soon know the parent of a child who has gone bad. If we count rapists, we probably already do.

When Ben slices through Han with his lightsaber, the father
responds by touching his son’s face, by projecting, as much as he can, the love
he feels for the boy that broke him. Perhaps he wanted to try one last time to
reach the light that Leia firmly believes is in him. Whatever the reason, Star
Wars has once again put our core dilemma on the table: if curing society’s ills
necessitates abandoning our children, we will never succeed. All kids do bad things
and some will commit incomprehensible murderous acts. But they will always be
our children and we will always love them.

America needs public policy to acknowledge that love cannot
cure all ills while recognizing that parents always carry the burdens their
children create. To achieve this, we need a cultural myth to help us discuss
the philosophical dilemmas that arise as we consider the evil that kids can do.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a
great first step, but we must not wait until Episode Eight to take the next
one.

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